Blessed Silence
by The Cake Genius
Summary: All his life, Sherlock has never been able to maintain a singular train of thought. His brain has always been too loud for him to have any silence. A dash of Johnlock, drabble-ish, not terribly original. Rated T only for minor mentions of drug use.


**Disclaimer: I do not own BBC Sherlock. I do not even own one box set.**

**A/N: This was written entirely on a whim, and I do not at all promise quality. This was not proof-read, and was not thought through particularly well. I just sat down and wrote it.**

**I am stating it here: From here on out, I am dedicating all of my Johnlock fics to AnimeRomantic4Ever, at least in part. There, now I won't have to write the same Author's Note over and over.**

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There had never been a singular train of thought in Sherlock's head, and he supposed that was why most people couldn't understand him. It was difficult to explain to people the way his mind worked: like drawing three lines in the same maze at once, or like a huge, tangled ball of yarn. As he worked, he would also think about his other cases, while at the same time predicting what kind of tea John would drink after dinner. He would solve a math equation while questioning the moral logistics and implications of a housefly while the timer in his head waited for the second before the drop of saltwater in the turkey baster he held would reach the slug innards in the petri dish in front of him.

When he was young, he was often unable to fall asleep because of the thoughts and theories racing over each other, screaming at each other, in his head. He would try to talk to the theories, address them each out loud, but this got very frustrating very quickly because they were all talking at once, and too rapidly for him to express them out loud or on paper. Any essays he tried to write at the age of twelve were jumbled collections of opinions and thoughts, often non sequiturs, that refused to obey the tyrannical rule of silly things such as paragraphs.

By the time he reached fifteen, he had figured out how to split his brain up into differently functional pieces; there were pieces that could, for instance, negotiate with teachers, drug dealers, idiots. There were the parts that he dedicated to study and to schoolwork (two entirely different subjects). In the privacy of his own room, the carefully-sorted fragments of himself would collide together with an unstoppable magnetic force, striking together in a way that boomed through his skull. He would sniff cocaine like some people read the Bible while penning a paper on Freud, while thinking about the cracks on his ceiling, all while thoughts sprinted through his head with an amazing, whirlwind force.

It was because he had been able to divide his mind (seemingly) so well, that he eventually dedicated it to the scientific art of deduction. He already looked at the world through eyes that saw windowpanes as math equations and electrical outlets as chemical experiments, and it was not hard at all to acknowledge that he saw human beings similarly: as particularly complex jigsaw puzzles that he very well meant to solve.

At times, his thoughts were amazingly good company that kept him on the brink of discovery, excitement coursing through his veins instead of blood, like cocaine.

Other times, they were exponentially exhausting. He thought that if he could just grasp some level of control over his mind- if he could just make himself _shut up-_ that maybe he would finally be able to get some peace. From the age of two to when he was a full-grown man, he dedicated at least one day a year to sitting and clasping his trembling hands, staring at the wall but not seeing.

_Please be quiet, _he would think._ For one day, please be quiet. Come on, just for one day. Really, this is getting annoying._ His fuse was short, and his manner quick, and he threw tantrums just as well as he always had.

When he met John Hamish Watson, he had not expected anything special. He could easily figure out what the man's life had fundamentally been like, and he was accustomed to dealing with only that. However, by two months into their relationship as flatmates, Sherlock was beginning to suspect that John had some otherworldly powers.

He would wonder, for example, at how John never tired at eating the same breakfast every morning: toast with jam, no butter, a cup of black tea, and a scone (the condiments on which could vary), eating every las crumb with casual precision. He observed that John was able somehow to keep his hair at the exact same length throughout the span of a month (he measured multiple times while John was sleeping). He noticed with curiosity and some annoyance that brushing hands could send something through him; it was a bit like an electric shock, but closer to his ribcage, and a sort of strange, tingling shiver that made him feel at once both uncomfortably warm and bitingly cold.

He was sure of these powers when, for the first time, John had hugged him.

Sherlock had not been hugged very often in his life, and even then, the hugs were some sort of stiff an unfamiliar. But when he walked in the door after he had solved one particularly difficult case that he had forbidden John from attending for the purpose of not straining his newly-sprained ankle, he was immediately greeted by sturdy arms wrapping around him and a short fringe of blond hair at his neck.

It took Sherlock full five seconds to realize what was going on. There were no words narrating and examining his every move; there were no blaring sirens threatening to split apart his skull; there was not even one floating, random number that begged to be analyzed reluctantly in every way.

There was just... _warmth._

Even when Sherlock wrapped his arms, too, around John, there was still a pristine level of silence in his head. He took a deep breath, and was quiet.

_Silence. Finally, silence._


End file.
